Game not selling well? Find a tweet from a nobody talking about your shitty game being “woke.” Sensationalize it, position yourself as a bastion fighting against the hordes, imply that only by purchasing the failing game can the average liberal “fight back.”
Ooh, I know this one! WoTC already did that earlier this year by putting out their own “woke criticism” press-release so that they could secretly introduce gambling as a D&D product via blind-boxes.
Ffs, there’s no conspiracy here mate, the game is meeting expectations. The problem is there are a lot of trolls trying to tear it down because trans people are in it, not that the writers are calling out bigots.
Who are these fucking complete garbage people who can conceive of a world where there are elves, dwarves, Qunari and darkspawn, but trans people are a bridge too far?
I have no idea what woke even means anymore. It seems to mean “social awareness”. Black lives matters kind of a thing. Equal rights for trans people too of course. That doesn’t mean that everyone should support games being forced into having all genders, or races, or include trans people. Or all books or movies should be forced to have those things.
If you create something, it’s up to you how you want that to be. You are the artist.
This is not equal to hating trans people, and anyone with some iq points realizes this. We can’t turn every creation into a vehicle for trans rights.
That’s the anti-woke propaganda the text you’re quoting is complaining about. If you listen to anyone right wing long enough this is what they’ll bring up eventually. it’s “fake news” basically – very dangerous fake news.
yeah, I think there’s been a terrible miscommunication somewhere. It might help if you clarify – do you yourself believe that there is a sizeable contingent of people who want to force games to include all walks of life?
I have no idea. I don’t read about games very much and don’t follow what’s happening. I guess games are like movies, we like to identify with the characters to feel the game is good. Sometimes it’s hard if they are very different from us, and then the movie / game is very boring or even annoying.
There’s a few, very vocal idiots every now and then who believe that every group/minority should be represented in every piece of media. A lot of the time they don’t even belong to any of those minorities. And then there’s the people who comply to cater to that audience, because they appear bigger in numbers than they are.
Don’t wanna get “canceled” on Xitter, you know? /s
Anyway, I don’t care personally. I haven’t really seen a lot of examples in media where the creators made characters part of a minority, maybe even retroactively, just to please a certain demographic. The closest I can think of is J.K. Rowling’s Xitter account. That was interesting to watch, to say the least lol
And when the artists chooses to include all genders, or races, or trans people; what would you call the effort to force the artists from removing this from their art?
That is what the culture war is. The effort to create an environment where publishers and artists have a harder time including aspects labeled “woke” because of a loud minority will harass the people involved, review bomb the products, dominate the discourse with bad faith arguments, and generally minimize the potential enjoyment of anyone who is the intended audience. This is what forcing an agenda upon artists looks like.
I think I’m on the other side - I think it’s way too much woke agenda in a lot of popular TV shows we watch. Disney competely wrecked a lot of shows because they kept pushing in gender/race related things that felt competely out of place.
I couldn’t even watch the acolyte. They wrecked it competely. Many web pages have described what’s wrong with it so won’t repeat that here, but hopefully you already know what I mean.
If you don’t like something, that’s fine. They made the product they want, they’re free to do that, and you’re free to not like it.
Just know that art has always driven social discussion, and it’s always been met with heavy social opposition, just usually in the form of outright censorship. So historically artists had to be subtle in order to be critical without being censored. In order to see more edgy stuff you had to go to small, barely funded art house shows.
But then the internet happened, and suddenly artists weren’t beholden to a small number of elite entertainment corporations. Art containing more openly progressive ideas can now be shared directly with the masses, the masses are now preferring progressive ideals more than ever before, and naturally corporations making entertainment products now have a financial incentive to cater to that demographic (often called “virtue signaling”). Today you see a mix of corporate pandering and actual art, even within the development teams of a mainstream product like Dragon Age or Disney. Some messaging feels honest, others feel ham fisted because it’s pride month.
But the censorship of the pre-internet days existed for a reason. A lot of people feel uncomfortable seeing things that challenge their status quo. People tend to seek comfort, and they just want their entertainment to leave them be. But now that corporate censors are less of a barrier, and now that progressive ideals are proliferating, the people themselves are backlashing. They say things like, “it’s way too much woke agenda, I’m tired of it. I want to watch a show without having the story be about woke issues.” I think that’s also normal.
I think the backlash is two fold: On the one hand, real art challenges the viewer, which can be exhausting when you just want to be entertained before you get a few hours of sleep and go back to work in the morning. But on the other hand, you do have what offen feels like a disengenuous layer of progressive pandering coming from corporations that you never saw before. And no one likes being pandered to, let alone not being pandered to.
I think this corporate pandering towards progressive ideals is new, the terms we use to describe everything are definitely new, but the tendency for art to expose people to progressive ideals and the tendency for the masses to be conservative and resist change are as old as humanity. And I view the two as a social evolutionary yin and yang, keeping each other in check.
They made the product they want, they’re free to do that.
But they aren’t free – Disney has total executive control. This is nothing new though; they used to use this power to censor queerness in shows before (e.g. Gravity Falls). They may still perhaps, and may do so again. Disney in general reigns in everything to make it a sterile corporate product and the artists involved have to swim upstream to make something they want.
We should all boycott Disney and take its capitalist grip off our culture. Then we can have vastly more diverse media, certainly with more queerness.
Out of curiosity, did you like Andor? Because it had all that stuff too but it was well written instead. Just think about how many women are lead roles on Andor for a second.
Dude I’m trans and hate the acolyte. It’s cause it’s shit not “woke”
There’s plenty of “non woke” media that’s shit too
Turns out if you write nothing but shit you get nothing but shit. This is a capitalism putting restrictions on the artist not our society.
It’s happened time and time again they force trends and focus tested ideas into the writing room instead of true passion. It will happen no matter the context. Shit media will just be shit media regardless of “wokeness” that’s just a current symptom of how we create media. It’s all for profit not for the sake of art.
I thought I’d never meet a trans person and very few gay people in the agricultural college I attended when I went back to college. Turned out every damn one of the friends I made was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. So as the other person said “as far as you know”
Acceptance of gay and trans rights has allowed so many people to realize they’re not so straight or not so cisgender and that’s wonderful. People are finally finding the freedom to be who they are!
I support their rights, they are people, the genitals only mader in bed. I just don’t want aliens in the far future watching our shows and thinking “god damn, it was femboy paradies!”
These things are very tied together. Supporting people being who they are means supporting them if they want to publicly show their identity
I just don’t want aliens in the far future watching our shows and thinking “god damn, it was femboy paradies!”
What does that matter at all? Who cares what people in the far future think? What matters is what people think today, and representation helps people find their own identity and know that they’re included in society
Enough creators I follow are coming out as trans that I wonder if I’m missing something about myself. I don’t think it’s me… but if not, I sure can pick 'em.
Admittedly the rate among webcomic artists is through the fucking roof.
I used to think that. But the amount of people hiding it, or just coping, is probably higher than you think.
Like I live in a pretty small city with an average gay community, and all it took was one person coming out as trans for a bunch of others to go “oh you know what me too - let’s do this,” so now we have like a whole posse of trans men that I see at the gym all the time (with their gains and their cool names lol).
I’m not saying this is always the case by any stretch, but if someone is super butch or super femme, they might not be cis.
That doesn’t mean that everyone should support games being forced into having all genders, or races, or include trans people. Or all books or movies should be forced to have those things.
Literally no one is being “forced” to add diversity. This is just plain ignorant.
Besides, no one bats an eye when a character is a white cis hetero man, but the moment something slightly different from the normativity appears, suddenly it is forced and unrealistic.
Fuck that, LGBT people exist and we deserve the bare minimum of at least having proper representation in the media we consume.
This is not equal to hating trans people, and anyone with some iq points realizes this. We can’t turn every creation into a vehicle for trans rights.
Keep your bullshit IQ points talking point. Put yourself on someone’s shoes for once and try to imagine what it might be like for a trans person to experience seeing a character like them. And stop with this bullshit of “making every character trans”, that’s literally not happening.
It’s a very overused and absolutely terrible use of a word.
For two reasons:
It has a predefined meaning, and if you read what the DA creators say, they’re not actually “slamming” it. While they’re pretty openly hostile - and for good reason - that’s a far cry from what someone “slamming” someone else or a quote would be.
It’s inclusion in the headline is for sensationalism, which would not be needed as the “You’re an idiot!”-quote already does that. Or maybe it’s just surprising how desensitivized people on the net are nowadays.
To think it further, consider the whole headline had been slam-ified:
The best Dragon Age game is still Origins. They’ve had two sequels that haven’t matched the quality of the original. That’s what I would worry about. “Woke” had nothing to do with under-delivery.
This is the reality. EA, Ubisoft they both created masterpieces in the past. And they just got worse in every release with their beloved series. The reason is mostly nothing is simple anymore. People want simplicity, not bunch of launchers with additional accounts, always online single player games, tens of DLCs that were suppose to be in the main game.
Simplicity to access the content is important, but I’d argue just as important is they’ve tried to make the games simple and appealing to everyone, and they end up not really appealing to anyone. Make an interesting game for the people that want it. Don’t make a game no one wants.
It genuinely feels like the notion of a pure triple AAA RPG is slowly being torn down by publishers chasing the wide audience of action game fans who will ultimately not care that much for the end product.
Yep. Just look at Bioware. BG3 would have been theirs if they didn’t go the action game route. In the past they made BG and SWTOR, but then they made DA: Origins (not an action game, but moving that direction) and then Mass Effect. At that point they never went back from that direction. They’ve been successful most of the time, but I feel it can only last so long, because it isn’t really made for anyone anymore. I think we can see that now.
Dragon Age’s drop in reputation had nothing to do with launchers, given many if not most players were on console.
“Simplicity” is arguably what killed it, because they had an excellent formula with Origins, and “simplified” it to the point it lost its identity as a true RPG.
Wasn’t it dragon age 2 where the level design got super repetitive though? It felt like they kept reusing the same exact level design in ways that didn’t really make sense.
I’ve heard that, and it’s reasonable however I found the level design in the first one could be a little repetitive as well so I thought some of the criticism was somewhat unwarranted.
Yes, 2 had a lot of re-used locations. Some of them did make sense, as the story was almost entirely set within a single city, so certain locations are bound to pop up multiple times, especially as the game takes place over a decade or so.
But the real reason, 2 was developed and rushed out the door in like a year or something? It was a ridiculously short amount of time to develop a sequel to a game as big as DA:O. Unsurprisingly, this led to a LOT of re used assets and locations.
But though it obviously had failings, I, like some others, would probably put DA2 as the high point for the series telling really character driven stories with the most compelling cast of characters.
Oh yes, I played a mage in both and the difference was startling. In the first part you have immensly powerful spells, that could also backfire hard because the game had friendly fire. At high levels you could wipe everything on the screen, including your party. In the second, friendly fire was gone so you could blast away and suddenly you spun around like a kung-fu master for some reason.
I will agree that the asset reuse in 2 was bad. But I loved the game for putting me in completely different shoes from the norm. The settiing of the character as refugee was unique
Aye, let’s agree to respect each other’s opinion. No matter how wrong yours might be.
(joking of course, I actually like 2 a lot despite how clearly unfinished and rushed it was, although I really really disliked 3 except for the romances and the character interactions)
I always enjoyed the story of 2. Origins and 3 both fall for the same story beats aka “You are the Chosen One. Only you can save the World.”
Origins, you are the last of the Grey Wardens in Felderen. Only you can reunite everyone to stop the Blight.
3, only you can close the rifts, reunite everyone, and stop the Big Bad guy.
In 2n Varic actively mocks that in the beginning. Hawke is portrayed as the Chosen One. When challenged, Varic admits that he made it up. Hawke is a nobody in beginning, only kicks start the mage and templar war because of the people that they associated started everything. Cough Anders Cough Hawke really just stumbles from adventure to adventure because of their companions.
It’s a story about unintended consequences and how small events can lead into big events.
2’s biggest failure was the over use of the same assets. The is cave/house/ruin is the same layout all the other cave/house/ruin. It was fine when it made narrative sense however that it is only for a minority of the time.
It’s always weird to me when people talk about video games as if story is the single most important aspect.
Personally I think 2’s biggest folly was abandoning the deep RPG in favor of overly-simplistic hack and slash. A mistake 3 somewhat attempted to correct, and for that, I’ll take its weaker story because I enjoy playing it much more. And if course 1 blows them both out of the water in terms of RPG gameplay.
Inquisition wasn’t quite as bad, I actually enjoyed it because it made an attempt to walk back some of the “streamlining” from 2, though obviously they both pale in comparison to Origins.
I was kind of hopeful they’d rediscovered their identity somewhat with Inquisition, but 4 looks like that hope was misplaced. They doubled down on abandoning the RPG in favor of the overly simplistic button masher with a smattering of RPG elements that are more or less meaningless.
For me I loved Dragon Age 2 beacuse I came from Mass Effect and the streamlined effect totally felt like an ME game to me. Also loved the idea of setting things in one city it was something different. Totally get why people don’t like it tho.
Exactly. Woke is just a symptom not the reason. It’s hard to see a beloved series go bad but people should learn to move on if the game is bad. Just buy the game when it’s good and the problem is solved.
I think it’s a symptom because the creators using it to hide their bad games, and the idiots think the game is bad because it’s woke. If the game is already bad, it’s bad. Dragon Age games were always diverse and Dragon Age Origins was epitome of its genre. No one is talking about it being woke.
because the creators using it to hide their bad games
How does this work in particular? The hiding bit? Doesn’t it actually draw attention, considering how many people then spam “OMG SO WOKE!11!!angry!!” and so on threads everywhere?
They indeed draw attention. It’s basically there is no good or bad advertising from their point. However, this is a fantasy world and people would like to see psychically appealing characters, especially the playable ones. I believe this is the root issue.
When they have no good material, they start to promote unrelated things to gameplay. This is just one of those things.
Visuals are part of the experience, it’s not unrelated. Gameplay is the core, you only have make up without it. If the game turn out to be good, most of these will be forgotten. There are a lot of good games that can be considered as “woke” and no one talk about them like this. Because they are good games.
On broader range everything in the game is part of the experience. However there is a significance order to that. Core gameplay loop comes first, every person who plays the game experience this. Back story is lore. To me lore is also important and a very enjoyable part of the games, but some people are not interested in this and they tend to skip these parts. If they are optional (like reading books in Skyrim or reading pamphlets in Shadowrun etc.) they don’t even bother with them.
Citation: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, I can even put Stardew Valley in this list, though not as vocal as others. I didn’t see anyone bash these games as being woke, or maybe they are a minority if there are.
Not sure how commercial flop part is related but from what I understand from the people who talk about this, yeah it’s more or less something like that. Though I can easily say that many people have different definition of “woke” in their minds and it shows. Consistency differs.
This is my conclusion, from what I see, it is mostly about TQ+ part.
So this then begs the question, why are people decrying games as “woke” trying so hard to push their political agenda into gaming discussions? After all, as per point 1 + point 3, the game was already criticized/panned anyways, then someone came in and tries to push the critique onto a political level instead of a game one.
That’s a good question. I think it’s more like reciprocal, as a counter measure from conservative people. I wouldn’t approach this as left and right quarrel. What we see is political but not in its core I believe, it’s pushed into politics.
If simplify it, this whole debate is around having transition chest scars as a customization option, at least that’s what I see. Woke is just a bigger cluster here.
Citation: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, I can even put Stardew Valley in this list, though not as vocal as others. I didn’t see anyone bash these games as being woke, or maybe they are a minority if there are.
You have spend zero time in game forums talking about Baldur’s Gate 3 if you think it wasn’t criticized for being woke. The best game of the year by every metric, and conservatives got batshit insane about a slider for gender that contained “non-binary” as an option. The first year or so every second steam discussion was about that topic.
Which goes to show that it being heavily criticized for being woke has nothing to do with quality. It’s not a “symptom” of a bad game, like you wrote earlier.
If Dragon age flops it will do so because it’s a bad game, not because it’s woke - the people who actually give games bad ratings for that are thankfully always a very small minority, no matter what a conservative bubble, right wing influencers, or some random internet shit storm might suggest to you. Your original comment simply missed the point.
That’s a good point. I probably missed that because I didn’t visit those forums. Usually these discussions go around with already bad games. I actually checked BG3 Steam forums now however couldn’t find those threads without searching. Perhaps it was a vocal minority? If a game is good, majority don’t care about these details or they don’t express their feelings even though they’re conservatives.
I guess it would be more fitting if I said “symptom of an ongoing debate” or something like that. But like I said, these conversations go around on already bad games. Maybe they being bad attracts these conversations since those people have a tangible indication, even though it’s actually not the real reason of it’s being bad.
If Veilguard flops, there will be a lot of reasons to list. Not sure if wokeness would make into top 10.
Based on that, then, do you think that the folk complaining about wokeness are always the vocal minority and the reason you see it far more in unpopular games is that there’s not a higher ratio of positive reviews to hide the assholes?
They are not unanimous on everything, so probably no. However the racist and misogynist ones are a vocal minority. Like on everything, it’s a spectrum and it’s not wise to put all of them in the same category.
there’s not a higher ratio of positive reviews to hide the assholes?
I don’t think it works like anonymity and if they are the only ones who give negative reviews on a successful game, it would be easy to find them in all those positive reviews. It is possible that people who gave a positive review also mentioned that they are uncomfortable with these specs. You won’t see them if you only check negative reviews. I would say you can find both civil and assholes in anti-woke people. Same thing goes for the woke people as well. The problem here is, the ones who hold these debates on the internet are usually the assholes from both side. It’s crazy. I guess we have enough people here on Lemmy now since things are not so different from Reddit anymore.
Aye, it has become another dogwhistle of the weirdo alt right crowd. It’s kinda helpful because whenever you see someone use it unironically, you can just safely block/ban them at no loss of conversation.
Woke is not a symptom. What people usually complain about with “woke” is more choices for the player to personalize their experience. Body type 1 or 2 instead of male female? Woke. Different skincolors? Woke. Woman in charge? Woke.
(I’m so sorry for writing so much. Skip to the last paragraph if you have to. There’s a tension in me because I fall on both sides a bit.)
It’s an indicator of developer focus and intent. Sometimes.
If people’s introduction to trans characters wasn’t “hi, I’m trans” then maybe they wouldn’t have these stereotypes, but we are where we are. Pretending that it’s just extra options is ignoring that the people that push this sort of thing also seem to think we also want to read their shitty writing and shitty characters.
Their dumblelore/voldemort slash fiction bullshit was trash 15 years ago and they haven’t improved because their focus is social issues, not good writing. That’s the real issue - paper thin characters that are just vehicles for social commentary. Subversion isn’t annoying your audience from the start, it’s developing deep characters with all the flaws of humanity that also happen to have atypical identities.
My favorite book series are The Culture novels and Discworld. They both have trans characters that aren’t there just to push narrative. They were well written characters that fit the world and also trans. In the culture it’s not even remarkable - they’ve solved everything biological so it’s just kind of there. Discworld is more by-the-horns, but he still manages to be sneaky with the subversion and it works every fucking time.
On the flip side, Hugo award winner A Deepness in the Sky has a character that uses gender neutral pronouns which is whatever. Not a big deal, but it was the first time I saw it in a book. What was the book? Torture/rape fantasy set in space. It’s one of two books I couldn’t finish. The other is Atlas Shrugged. Coming from someone that’s read a lot of more classic science fiction and considered a Hugo a seal of approval, that was a very harsh realization.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with extra options or making ugly characters (though I don’t get that - there’s a sweet spot between fan service and trash can) but I don’t consider them a useful feature if the game is shit. If they focus on the game and add ‘woke’ shit to a good game with well written characters it’ll go down like honey. If the devs see the game as a vehicle to disseminate their social ideas, they’re in love with themselves and not the game and people will see that. It can, and has, been done well.
That’s what I think as well. If it requires, just put 18+ inscription and let people decide for themselves, which I believe Veilguard already has that rating.
I think a lot of the hating on Gamepass is justified, but I’ve just gotta say as a partially blind gamer it has been a godsend for me.
I used to struggle with whether or not to buy a game every single time because in most cases there is no way from descriptions and reviews for me to know how any given game will work with my vision and fine/gross motor impairment.
With gamepass I can try things and if I can’t play it? I move on and try something else.
Kinda sad that we can’t find some middle ground between making games accessible for disabled folks without bankrupting developers and ultimately hurting consumers.
Is this going to be another ET situation where we find hundreds of Xbox games in a random desert 40 years from now because Microsoft wanted to kill physical copies?
Tacit Collusion: a type of collusive behavior where firms coordinate their actions without explicitly communicating or reaching an agreement. Instead, firms may signal their intentions through various actions, such as pricing behavior or output levels, in order to coordinate their behavior and achieve higher profits.
If that were the case, companies would go down left right and center. What do you think the gas stations are doing? Landlords? Companies hiring devs? Everything is becoming lockstepped and thats why we are losing.
We need to break up businesses above 999 mil in assets (including other companies) and break up entry barriers for new businesses. Amend the laws to exclude large companies from any securities so it is actually too risky to become this big.
Its not really hard to do but people need to stop working for a day every month to push this. Take to the streets and unionize en masse.
Everyone who is not part of a union is part of the problem at this point.
No recorded direct link of communication. The CEOs and half the board will individually go to company paid lunches with competition, members of the board are straight up members of a competing board. Or even lobbyists and lawyers of competing companies going to events together that happens daily.
“But I pinky promise we don’t talk about our competing business plans while we eat lunch and golf together”
I think most conspiracy theories are bullshit. Especially things that require mass government, academic, and/or inter-industry coordination just cannot happen easily due to the fact that large scale coordination of people is very very difficult.
But in a market with 2-4 long-standing players in an oligopoly with offices right by each other, you bet your ass there is in-person collusion… it has been caught many times and likely the extreme vast majority of cases are not caught. Price adjustment is extremely easy to collude on and has mountains of excuses of plausible deniability and “just following the market” bs. So far, there has yet to be a market that has remained competitive and hasn’t turned into an oligopoly. Monopoly is the steady state of a capitalist system without strict anti-competitive regulations.
Sounds like the price reduction will be only in Walmart accounting system, so they can justify throwing them all away and write off the lost sales. I doubt they will actually sell all of those games.
Per the article, Microsoft is paying them not to sell any of the physical games and take them off the shelves. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they end up buried in a landfill next to ET.
Save you all the read, games won’t be discounted or even sold for that matter. They are just being removed from shelves.
" An internal memo has surfaced online stating that all copies will be reduced to 3 cents and sales will be blocked by the store’s system and then removed from the store. As of right now, it appears this is only for Xbox games, but this move was reported last October and it seems to be coming to fruition. It was noted that Microsoft is funding this move for Walmart in the memo, suggesting it may be Microsoft’s decision and not Walmart’s. "
Ubisoft *** said the quiet part out loud and Microsoft decided just to speed run it. I do love all the one piece memes of a great pirate era beginning though.
It could be that Walmart was planning to start winding down physical game sales and made that clear to Microsoft, but Microsoft made a deal to foot the bill for extra inventory to keep supply available during the holidays. Even with packaging and distribution, the actual cost per game to Microsoft isn't really that high.
This might mean it’s true that the upcoming Xbox Series X refresh won’t have a hard drive. Microsoft wouldn’t want Xbox games to be on store shelves when they’re no longer selling consoles that can play them.
comicbook.com
Gorące